* {{App|[[Steam]]|Famous digital distribution and communications platform developed by Valve, featuring popular games recently ported to Linux (by the company itself). It has a large library that includes Source (Half-Life 2) and Goldsource (HL1) engine games, Serious Sam 3, Brutal Legend, almost all of the games from Humble Bundles and some other indie titles.

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* {{App|[[Steam]]|Famous digital distribution and communications platform developed by Valve, featuring popular games recently ported to Linux (by the company itself). It has a large library that includes Source (Half-Life 2) and Goldsource (HL1) engine games, Serious Sam 3, Brutal Legend, many of the games from Humble Bundles and some other indie titles.

Unity – specialized game plugin for browsers. Currently works only in Google Chrome. Most games are commercial and/or closed-source.

HTML 5 games use brand new canvas and WebGL technologies and work in all modern browsers but can be very slow on weak machines.

Specialized environments (software emulators) – – Required for running software designed for other architectures or systems, (Heed the copyright laws of your country!). Check the list of emulators for more details.

Wine – allows running of some Windows games, as well as a large amount of Windows software. Wine does not slowdown most games (even speeds up some), so most games with low system requirements that run in Windows work in Wine too. Consult Wine AppDB for game-specific compability information.

Crossover Games – members of the Codeweavers team are prime supporters of Wine. Using Crossover Games makes the installation & setting up of some games easier, more reliable & even possible, when compared to using other methods. Crossover is a paid commercial product, which also provides a forum where the developers are very much involved in the community.

Cedega – game-oriented Wine derivative. Its packaged version is not free of charge unlike its CVS version.

Digital distributions

Steam — Famous digital distribution and communications platform developed by Valve, featuring popular games recently ported to Linux (by the company itself). It has a large library that includes Source (Half-Life 2) and Goldsource (HL1) engine games, Serious Sam 3, Brutal Legend, many of the games from Humble Bundles and some other indie titles.

Wine

Running games

Certain games or game types may need special configuration to run or to run as expected.
For the most part, games will work right out of the box in Arch Linux with possibly better performance than on other distributions due to compile time optimizations. However, some special setups may require a bit of configuration or scripting to make games run as smoothly as desired.

Multi-screen setups

Running a multi-screen setup may lead to problems with fullscreen games. In such a case, running a second X server is one possible solution. Another solution may be found in the NVIDIA article (may also apply to non-NVIDIA users).

Keyboard grabbing

Many games grab the keyboard, noticeably preventing you from switching windows (also known as alt-tabbing). Download sdl-nokeyboardgrabAUR to gain the ability to use keyboard commands while in SDL games. If you wish to turn it up to 11, you can disable keyboard grabbing at X11 level using libx11-nokeyboardgrabAUR, or with more fine-grained control with libx11-ldpreloadnograbAUR using the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to run applications with particular grab prevention. Wine/lib32 users should also look at the respective lib32 libraries.

Note: SDL is known to sometimes not be able to grab the input system. In such a case, it may succeed in grabbing it after a few seconds of waiting.

Starting games in a separate X server

In some cases like those mentioned above, it may be necessary or desired to run a second X server. Running a second X server has multiple advantages such as better performance, the ability to "tab" out of your game by using Ctrl+Alt+F7/Ctrl+Alt+F8, no crashing your primary X session (which may have open work on) in case a game conflicts with the graphics driver. To start a second X server (using Xonotic as an example) you can simply do:

$ xinit /usr/bin/xonotic-glx -- :1

This can further be spiced up by using a seperate X configuration file:

$ xinit /usr/bin/xonotic-glx -- :1 -xf86config xorg-game.conf

A good reason to provide an alternative xorg.conf here may be that your primary configuration makes use of NVIDIA's Twinview which would render your 3D games like Xonotic in the middle of your multiscreen setup, spanned across all screens. This is undesirable, thus starting a second X with an alternative config where the second screen is disabled is advised.

A game starting script making use of Openbox for your home directory or /usr/local/bin may look like this:

Adjusting mouse detections

For games that require exceptional amount of mouse skill, adjusting the mouse polling rate can help improve accuracy.

HRTF filters with OpenAL

For games using OpenAL, if you use headphones you may get much better positional audio using OpenAL's HRTF filters. To enable, edit /etc/openal/alsoft.conf (or copy the example configuration file if it doesn't exist) and change:

#hrtf = false

to:

hrtf = true

Tuning Pulseaudio

If you're using Pulseaudio, you may wish to tweak some default settings to make sure it's running optimally.

Enabling realtime priority and negative nice level

Pulseaudio is built to be run with realtime priority, being an audio daemon. However, because of security risks of it locking up the system, it's scheduled as a regular thread by default. To adjust this, first make sure you're in the audio group. Then, uncomment and edit the following lines in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

high-priority = yes
nice-level = -11

realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-priority = 5

and restart pulseaudio.

Using higher quality remixing for better sound

Pulseaudio on Arch uses speex-float-0 by default to remix channels, which is considered a 'medium-low' quality remixing. If your system can handle the extra load, you may benefit from setting it to one of the following instead:

Matching hardware buffers to Pulse's buffering

Matching the buffers can reduce stuttering and increase performance marginally. See here for more details.

Cgroups

Cgroups are a kernel adjustment that allows processes to be grouped together and prioritized in userspace, allowing for minimum latency. They adjust several factors, such as IO prioritization and CPU prioritization.

Option 1 - systemd (recommended)

Systemd is able to handle Cgroups less specifically by itself, in order to make the system run smoothly with any number of threads running.

Simply install it to take advantage of this improvement.

Option 2 - Ulatencyd

Note: Ulatencyd seems to sometimes over-prioritize, especially when it comes to block IO, which can often starve other threads from the same process or process group. Systemd provides a much more lightweight approach.

Ulatencyd is a daemon which uses dynamic cgroups to give the kernel hints to reduce latency in the system. It comes with a number of configs, and is extensively helpful in prioritizing disk I/O. Installing it will again increase responsiveness and reduce input lag. To use, simply install it and enable the ulatencyd systemd service.

In addition, Ulatencyd has it's own method for specifically reducing latency in games, by focusing in on that one individual process. To take advantage of this, add entries into /etc/ulatencyd/simple.d/games.conf:

If you are using an SSD or simply have changed the default scheduler for any block devices, it may be advisable to edit the default settings, as Ulatencyd reverts the default scheduler back to cfq.

However, CFQ does seem to be best at load balancing when multiple threads are involved, which is a very common arrangement for games. It's best to try all available schedulers before settling on any particular one.

Double check your CPU frequency scaling settings

If your system is currently configured to properly insert its own cpu frequency scaling driver, the system sets the default governor to Ondemand. By default, this governor only adjusts the clock if the system is utilizing 95% of its CPU, and then only for a very short period of time. This saves power and reduces heat, but has a noticeable impact on performance. You can instead only have the system downclock when it is idle, by tuning the system governor. To do so, see Cpufrequtils#Improving on-demand performance.

Improving framerates and responsiveness with scheduling policies

Most every game can benefit if given the correct scheduling policies for the kernel to prioritize the task. However, without the help of a daemon, this rescheduling would have to be carried out manually or through the use of several daemons for each policy. These policies should ideally be set per-thread by the application itself, but not all developers implement these policies. There are several methods for getting them to work anyway:

For Wine programs

wine-rtAUR is a patched version of Wine that implements scheduling policies on a per-thread basis, using the equivalent of what the Windows developers had intended the threads to be run at. The default patch is more oriented towards professional audio users, and tends to be too heavy-handed of an approach for gaming. You may instead wish to use this patch, which also includes nice levels and uses more than one policy decision. Be warned that it uses SCHED_ISO, which is only properly implemented on Linux-ck, and will simply renice THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL threads if your system does not support it.

For everything else

For programs which do not implement scheduling policies on their own, one tool known as schedtool, and it's associated daemon schedtooldAUR can handle many of these tasks automatically.
To edit what programs relieve what policies, simply edit /etc/schedtoold.conf and add the program followed by the schedtool arguments desired.

Policies

First and foremost, setting the scheduling policy to SCHED_ISO will not only allow the process to use a maximum of 80 percent of the CPU, but will attempt to reduce latency and stuttering wherever possible.
SCHED_ISO requires Linux-ck to operate, as it has only been implemented in that kernel. Linux-ck itself provides a hefty latency reduction, and should ideally be installed
Most if not all games will benefit from this:

bit.trip.runner -I

For users not using Linux-ck, SCHED_FIFO provides an alternative, that can even work better. You should test to see if your applications run more smoothly with SCHED_FIFO, in which case by all means use it instead. Be warned though, as SCHED_FIFO runs the risk of starving the system! Use this in cases where -I is used below:

bit.trip.runner -F -p 15

Nice levels

Secondly, the nice level sets which tasks are processed first, in ascending order. A nice level of -4 is reccommended for most multimedia tasks, including games:

bit.trip.runner -n -4

Core affinity

There is some confusion in development as to whether the driver should be multithreading, or the program. In any case where they both attempt it, it causes drops in framerate and crashes. Examples of this include a number of modern games, and any Wine program which is running without GLSL disabled. To select a single core and allow only the driver to handle this process, simply use the -a 0x# flag, where # is the core number, e.g.:

bit.trip.runner -a 0x1

uses first core.
Some CPUs are hyperthreaded and have only 2 or 4 cores but show up as 4 or 8, and are best accounted for:

bit.trip.runner -a 0x5

which use virtual cores 0101, or 1 and 3.

General case

For most games which require high framerates and low latency, usage of all of these flags seems to work best. Affinity should be checked per-program, however, as most native games can understand the correct usage.
For a general case:

Optimus, and other helping programs

As a general rule, any other process which the game requires to operate should be reniced to a level above that of the game itself. Strangely, Wine has a problem known as reverse scheduling, it can often have benefits when the more important processes are set to a higher nice level. Wineserver also seems unconditionally to benefit from SCHED_FIFO, since rarely consumes the whole CPU and needs higher prioritization when possible.

optirun -I -n -5
wineserver -F -p 20 -n 19
steam.exe -I -n -5

Using alternate kernels

The stock Arch kernel provides a very good baseline for general usage. However, if your system has less than 16 cores and is intended for use primarily as a workstation, you can sacrifice a small amount of throughput on batch workloads and gain a significant boost to interactivity by using Linux-ck. If you prefer not to compile your own kernel, you can instead add Repo-ck and use one of their kernels. Using a pre-optimized kernel will most definitely offset any loss of throughput that may have occurred as a result, so be sure to select the appropriate kernel for your architecture.

Using BFQ

BFQ is an io-scheduler that comes as a feature of Linux-ck, and is optimized to be much more simplistic, but provides better interactivity and throughput for non-server workloads. To enable, see Linux-ck#How_to_Enable_the_BFQ_I.2FO_Scheduler. It is important to note that although most guides recommend using either noop or deadline for SSDs for their raw throughput, they are actually detrimental to interactivity when more than one thread is attempting to access the device. It's best to use bfq unless you desperately need the throughput advantage.